Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 11, 2013 @08:11AM
from the chip-on-shoulder-view-of-the-world dept.

colinneagle writes "At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago, Microsoft senior product manager Jesse McGatha discussed why Microsoft recently announced that Windows 8.1 will support 3D printing, even giving a demo of a sample app for printing a design file. But in the presentation it became clear that Microsoft is capitalizing on the recent hype of 3D printing and positioning itself to capitalize on the future consumer markets for 3D printing. However, a Gartner analyst recently warned that 3D printing may not become the household consumer item that some are making it out to be. So, by capitalizing on the buzz, Microsoft may attract makers, innovators, and even enterprise customers that use 3D printing, but avoids any risk if the consumer market fails to reach its potential."

DOS supported printing, in the sense that you could interface to a printer through LPT1. The way in which Apple and Microsoft worked towards abstracting the process of printing was a quite different thing. This could be a 3rd party library, but the point is that there is some brokering beyond the specific API, software, and specifications released by individual manufacturers.